(no subject)

I haven't been doing a good job lately of updating about my reading. I have recently finished both The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore. Working my way through the series yet again. This time the thing that I'm noticing most is how LeGuin is able to accomplish so much with so little: simple language and straightforward prose, tending slightly at times toward formality, yet the effect is so powerful... Even with all my familiarity with these books, there are still sentences that knock me flat. I find that I have to keep reminding myself that she had to work to make it that way, that it didn't all just flow out of her pen in this perfect state. I tell students all the time that nothing they read--no book, no article in a magazine or newpaper--is in the same form that it was when its author first set it down; it's all be revised and worked over and edited in order to become what you see before you, and therefore you shouldn't be upset about the fact that your own writing is not perfect on the first go. I say it so often that I never would have thought I would have such trouble internalizing that idea. Yet here I am, jealous of what I perceive as LeGuin's perfection. It's because my own writing has been such a struggle lately. I am finally (finally!) back in the habit of working on the book every day, but for the past few weeks I have been unable to produce more than a few sentences a day. I don't know what to do to fix that.